Friday, May 17, 2013

The Milestones of the Space Epoch (1967)

Yet another nice Russian book. This everything included approach suggests it might have been for young adults/popular consumption.Vasiliev, M. The milestones of the space epoch. Moscow: Mashinostroenie. 1967. (226 p.) 17.5 cm x 22.3 cm.

The colored plates in this book make it very attractive. The text and most of the illustrations focus on the history of Russian space exploration. The plates however convey the romantic visions of places people had yet to go.

While the Russians never made it to the Moon, this vision of an astronaut seeing where the first unmanned probes had landed is a powerful thought. The Apollo 12 mission got to enact this painting with their retreval of the Surveyor 3 Surface sampler scoop.

The Russians seem to love paintings of Saturn in their space art. This painting of a colony on one of Saturn's moons is very striking.

Viewing the earth from space was already happening when this book was published but the "airiness" of the space station structure gives a different emotion to seeing the home planet.

A fully developed moonbase has been a long-time dream. In this one we observe mining the Moon for resources.

Finally an illustration of a solar sailor, using sunlight to propel a probe.